Wednesday, May 20, 2015

Spring Week 6: Building Critical Thinking Skills

Critical
thinking is the purposeful, self-regulatory judgment which results in
interpretation, analysis, evaluation, and inference, as well as explanation of
the evidential, conceptual, methodological, criteriological, or contextual
considerations upon which that judgment is based. Critical thinking is hard and
a complicated process, often referred to as “higher-order skill” and we humans are
not naturally good at it. Unlike running
which is natural for us, critical thinking is like ballet, a highly contrived
activity. Thus with only many years of dedicated training and practice we would
be able to do well as “critical thinkers”.

First several
individual skills should be acquired including both the Lower Order Thinking
Skills (remember, understand and apply) and the Higher Order Thinking Skills
(analyze, evaluate and create). But that’s not all. To be considered “good
critical thinker” one should be able to master putting all those individual
skills together in perfect balance, something which takes years and years of
practice.

That
being said, in order to cultivate our critical thinking skills as teachers and
in turn start training our students as critical thinkers for them to become the
future successful lawyers, scientists, politicians and educators, we need to
understand how critical thinking works. In other words we need to resort to the
contributions made by Cognitive Science.

“Thinking” from a Cognitive Science
point of view

Recent
scientific research suggests that human thinking and decision-making is very
complex and integrates two parallel-functioning systems.

In System 1 thinking, one relies heavily
on a number of heuristics (cognitive maneuvers), key situational
characteristics, readily associated ideas, and vivid memories to arrive quickly
and confidently at a judgment. System 1 thinking is particularly helpful in
familiar situations when time is short and immediate action is required.

While System 2 is the more reflective
thinking system. It is useful for making judgments when you find yourself in
unfamiliar situations and have more time to figure things out. It allows us to
process abstract concepts, to deliberate, to plan ahead, to consider options
carefully, to review and revise our work in the light of relevant guidelines or
standards or rules of procedure.

Both System 1
and System 2 work together to help us make sound decisions and refrain from
making foolish or even dangerous errors in judgment. But even a good thinker
makes errors due to the influences and misapplications of these cognitive
heuristics. Thus by understanding the components of these two systems and how each
of them influence us we would be able to overcome or get passed the heuristics
and biases resulting from these components which otherwise will impair our
ability to think critically.

The five heuristics that
more frequently operate in our System 1 reasoning are known as availability,
affect, association, simulation, and similarity.

The Availability heuristic, is the
coming to mind of a story or vivid memory of something that happened to you or
to someone close to you, inclines a person make inaccurate estimates of the
likelihood of that thing’s happening again.

The Affect heuristicoperates when you have an immediate positive or a negative
reaction to some idea, proposal, person, object, whatever. Sometimes called a
“gut reaction” this affective response sets up an initial orientation in us,
positive or negative, toward the object. It takes a lot of System 2 reasoning
to overcome a powerful affective response to an idea, but it can be done.

The Association heuristic is operating when
one word or idea reminds us of something else. For example, some people
associate the word “cancer” with “death.” Some associate “sunshine” with
“happiness.” These kinds of associational reasoning responses can be helpful at
times, as for example if associating cancer with death leads you not to smoke and
to go in for regular checkups. At other times the same association may
influence a person to make an unwise decision, as for example if associating
“cancer” with “death” were to lead you to be so fearful and pessimistic that
you do not seek diagnosis and treatment of a worrisome cancer symptom until it
was really too late to do anything.

The Simulation heuristic is working when
you are imagining how various scenarios will unfold. People often imagine how a
conversation will go, or how they will be treated by someone else when they
meet the person, or what their friends or boss or lover will say and do when
they have to address some difficult issue. These simulations, like movies in
our heads, help us prepare and do a better job when the difficult moment
arrives. But they can also lead us to have mistaken expectations. People may
not respond as we imagined, things may go much differently. Our preparations
may fail us because the ease of our simulation misled us into thinking that
things would have to go as we had imagined them. And they did not.

The Similarity heuristic operates when we
notice some way in which we are like someone else and infer that what happened
to that person is therefore more likely to happen to us. The similarity
heuristic functions much like an analogical argument or metaphorical model. The
similarity we focus on might be fundamental and relevant, which would make the
inference more warranted. For example, the boss fired your coworker for missing
sales targets and you draw the reasonable conclusion that if you miss your
sales targets you’ll be fired too. Or the similarity that comes to mind might
be superficial or not connected with the outcome, which would make the
inference unwarranted. For example you see a TV commercial showing trim-figured
young people enjoying fattening fast foods and infer that because you’re young
too you can indulge your cravings for fast foods without gaining a lot of
excess unsightly poundage.

Heuristics and biases more associated with System 2 thinking include:
satisficing, risk/loss aversion, anchoring with adjustment, and the illusion of
control.

Satisficing occurs as we consider our
alternatives. When we come to one which is good enough to fulfill our
objectives we often regard ourselves as having completed our deliberations. We
have satisficed. And why not? The choice is, after all, good enough. It may not
be perfect, it may not be optimal, it may not even be the best among the
options available. But it is good enough. Time to decide and move forward.

We are by
nature a species that is averse to risk
and loss. Often we make decisions on the basis of what we are too worried
about losing, rather than on the basis of what we might gain. The odds may not
be stacked against us, but the consequences of losing at times are so great
that we would prefer to forego the possibilities of gain in order not to lose
what we have.

The heuristic
known as Anchoring with Adjustment
is operative when we find ourselves making evaluative judgments. The natural
thing for us to do is to locate or anchor our evaluation at some point along
whatever scale we are using. The unfortunate thing about this heuristic is that
we sometimes drop anchor in the wrong place; we have a hard time giving people
a second chance at making a good first impression.

The heuristic
known as Illusion of Control is
evident in many situations. Many of us over-estimate our abilities to control
what will happen. We make plans for how we are going to do this or that, say
this or that, manipulate the situation this way or that way, share or not share
this information or that possibility, all the time thinking that some how our
petty plans will enable us to control what happens.

Related to
the Illusion of Control heuristic is the tendency to misconstrue our personal
influence or responsibility for past events. This is called Hindsight Bias. We may over-estimate
the influence our actions have had on events when things go right, or we may
underestimate our responsibility or culpability when things go wrong. We have
all heard people bragging about how they did this and how they did that and, as
a result, such and such wonderful things happened.

Practical approaches for teaching
critical thinking

Now we
understand the components underlying Critical Thinking, and understand how each
component if left uncontrolled might refrain us from making sound decisions. With
these lessons from Cognitive Science in mind we discussed about practical
approaches that can be adopted in the classroom to teach critical thinking.
Some of these approaches include:

-Leading
students to the correct answer and making them come up with the answer
themselves rather than the teacher giving away the answer right away.

-Guided
reading: While asking students to critically evaluate a reading material, give
them a set of questions for them to think about while they are reading.

-Asking
students to evaluate the conclusions derived from data.

-Emphasizing
the importance of Critical Thinking with real life examples. Make them aware of
examples in history where lack of Critical Thinking skills has resulted in the
collapse of an empire, caused the death of thousands of people etc.

-Emphasizing
group work: In properly structured cooperative learning environments, students
perform more of the active, critical thinking with continuous support and
feedback from other students and the teacher.

-Adopting
a problem based learning approach, which studies show to increase the critical
thinking skills in students.

-Providing
examples of good critically evaluated statements and asking students why they
think it is good.

References:

1) Peter A. Facione (2013) Critical Thinking: What
It Is and Why It Counts.

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